Communicating between mobile devices that may be carried from place to place and a stationary devices is important for many types of situations. For example, in some hospitals, nurses are given an arbitrary phone to carry with them while making their rounds. The phone is tied to the hospital ward, but often not to the specific nurse. In addition, there may be either a computer in each hospital room or mobile computers on wheels that are used to access patient records. Nurses are very mobile and will often use many computers during the course of a day. Nurses have desired a way to faciltate entry of barcode data into the patient record or other healthcare applications running on the computer.
One problem is that one of a large number of mobile scanning devices must be temporarily connected to one of a large number of computers. Existing solutions, such as BLUETOOTH® equipment (BLUETOOTH is a registered trademark of Bluetooth SIG, Inc.), offer a mechanism to manage this pairing relationship, however there are a number of issues that BLUETOOTH pairing does not solve:
1) As phones or computers are replaced due to failure, upgrade, or other reasons, the management of the list of pairings between the phones and the computers becomes extremely difficult due to the number of permutations that must be managed.
2) Determining which computer a user is paired to is difficult without a lot of user interaction on the computer, and users cannot afford to spend time on that determination.
Another problem is that printed barcodes affixed to computers and used for identification of those computers by barcode scanning devices can be damaged, become out of date, or be removed.
Existing solutions attempt to address these issues but lack the simplicity for the user as well as security and administrative control required for hospitals attempting to comply with privacy laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). A way to simplify a mobile device user's required actions to make/break a connection, as well as to simplify the management effort to allow customers to connect many mobile scanning devices to many fixed or mobile computers has long been desired.